Reproductive Rights: Read the Constitution!

By Paul Abramson
(This article is reprinted here by permission of the magazine Reason where it originally appeared. Here is the link to the original article)

In 1991 I was in Geneva serving as a technical advisor to the World Health Organization's Global Programme on AIDS. We were chipping away at a task that seemed insurmountable: the exponential growth of the AIDS epidemic. But we knew our strategy—which relied on affordable condoms and clever advertising—could, at least theoretically, work. All we needed was user compliance.

The United States, however, wasn't pulling its weight, despite having plenty of money and technical expertise. Yes, the Centers for Disease Control was moving forward, publishing an article in 1981 about an opportunistic infection affecting immunosuppressed gay men. Four years later, an HIV antibody test was developed. By 1987, even Surgeon General C. Everett Koop had stepped up to the plate, urging that the nation's physicians recommend condom use for sexually active patients. 

But most Americans seemed as if they couldn't care less, staying far away from offenses to their Puritan sensibilities. Homosexuality, anal sex, IV drug use, and condoms? Not topics they were eager to help with. It didn't improve matters that the U.S. Supreme Court had recently reaffirmed that criminalizing homosexuality was constitutional in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986).

In Europe, though, I saw billboards that displayed an erect penis wearing a condom. Play safely was the tagline. I was informed not to hold my breath expecting the United States to follow suit. That was not surprising. Condom advertising, in and of itself, was forbidden on the radio, and print ads for them had vanished too. There was also the matter of obscenity law precedent, Miller v. California (1973) in particular. Did billboards of erect penises appeal to prurient interests based on local community standards?

I vented my frustration to Dr. Jonathan Mann, the founder of WHO's Global Programme on AIDS. How can this be? It's a worldwide epidemic! Since when is the truth immoral? Or obscene? And what about our sexual rights?

We have no sexual rights, Jonathan quickly informed me.

That can't be true, I continued. It makes no sense.

Read the Constitution, he said.   

I spent the next 10 years studying constitutional law, especially original documents relevant to the Bill of Rights. I dug into the writings of, and correspondence between, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. I also took a deep dive into the relevant Supreme Court cases, eventually writing two books about sexual rights: Sexual Rights in America: The Ninth Amendment and the Pursuit of Happiness (2003) and Romance in the Ivory Tower: The Rights and Liberty of Conscience (2007).

I was now officially a "sexual rights" guy, well aware that the story of legal condom acceptance throughout America could be traced back to Connecticut in the early 1960s. The state's government loathed jimmy hats and every other form of contraception, and its ban on them ended up being reconsidered by the Supreme Court in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965). The Court struck down the Connecticut statute because it violated"the right of marital privacy which is within the penumbra of specific guarantees of the Bill of Rights."

Though the outcome was laudable, the reasoning was disappointing. If inexplicit rights radiate as light emitting from the Bill of Rights, it's easy enough to claim that light can radiate from every other contract, social and otherwise. That, clearly, would damage the value of certainty and clarity one wants from contracts.

This is not to say that I oppose the right to privacy; quite the opposite. I'd argue, instead, that it was self-evident. Justice Arthur Goldberg's concurring opinion in Griswold agreed. The Ninth Amendment, with its call upon the rights retained by the people, he asserted, is more than sufficient to justify the right to privacy. Better yet, it's a rationale anchored in the history and language of the Bill of Rights, not just "emanations" that only this Court appeared to see.  

When Justice Goldberg soon left the Supreme Court to become the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations in 1965, he seemed to take the Ninth Amendment with him. One notable exception appeared in the opening statement of Roe v Wade on December 13, 1971. Sarah Weddington, the attorney who represented Jane Roe, asked the Supreme Court to affirm a district court ruling that the Texas abortion statute was unconstitutional "because it interfered with the Ninth Amendment rights of a woman to determine whether or not she would continue or terminate a pregnancy." 

However, when Weddington reargued Roe v Wade before the Supreme Court on October 11, 1972, she shifted her position to emphasize that the Texas abortion statute improperly invaded a right possessed by pregnant women to choose whether or not to terminate a pregnancy—a personal liberty embodied in the 14th Amendment's Due Process clause–or more generally, a pregnant women's right to privacy as codified in Griswold.

In either case, that reasoning has drawn to a close, thanks to a recent Supreme Court decision, Dobbs v. Jackson's Women's Health Organization. According to Justice Samuel Alito, there's no right to abortion since "it is not a fundamental constitutional right because such a right has no basis in the Constitution's text or in our Nation's history."

If one turns a blind eye toward the Ninth Amendment, one might reach such a conclusion, but that's hardly a sustainable rationale. All such facile declarations are premised on the nonexistence of the Ninth Amendment. Perhaps an abridged version of the Constitution was inadvertently circulated among some Justices?

Why the Ninth Amendment?

When James Madison drafted the Bill of Rights, he feared making some rights explicit would make it seem that only those rights demanded respect from government. But many citizens demanded a Bill of Rights, and some state constitutions already had them. Since ensuring ratification of the U.S. Constitution was his first order of business, Madison went along with writing a Bill of Rights. But to cover his own fears, he affixed an additional class of rights—those unenumerated—onto the Bill of Rights to ensure that they were also protected against government interference.

"It has been objected," James Madison proclaimed in a speech before the first Congress on June 8th, 1789, "against a bill of rights, that, by enumerating particular exceptions to the grant of power, it would disparage those rights which were not placed in that enumeration, and it might follow by implication, that those rights which were not singled out, were intended to be assigned into the hands of the general government and were consequently insecure."

How did he remedy this? With the Ninth and 10th amendments. He argued, after doing his best to articulate the specific rights in the first eight amendments, that additional adjustments were necessary to make it clear that enumerated freedoms weren't by any means the whole story of Americans' rights. The Ninth Amendment states that "the enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." The 10th declares that "the powers not delegated to the U.S. government, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people."

Contemplating, say, the East German police state, it seems obvious enough that the right to privacy is central to keeping a people free. There, the Stasi were everywhere, spying and wiretapping everyone and everything. And they were paying your friends, neighbors, and co-workers to spy on you and report your whereabouts regularly.

The right to privacy is the first and possibly the most important right that dictatorships and police states violate. That finding alone should be sufficient to show that the right to privacy is fundamental to a free democracy. Your right to vote, your right to religion, your right to speech and press—and so much more—all depend upon your ability to make decisions in private; have discussions in private; and ultimately exercise all of your constitutional rights, to some degree at least, in private.

So, is the right to privacy an example of a right retained by the people and protected by the Ninth Amendment? Most assuredly so. You don't need penumbra to light the way. And you don't need a civil rights amendment, like the 14th, to come to your rescue either. Madison made sure of that. The Ninth Amendment is one of the original amendments in the Bill of Rights.

The right to privacy, as summoned in Griswold, also has obvious implications for our sexual and reproductive freedoms. But even more basically, the people must retain a right, a freedom that is, to make reproductive choices on their own. It's impossible to even conceive of "the people" without this reproductive right. Reproduction is the biological engine that drives natural selection. Is that a right retained by the people? How could it be otherwise? Must it be granted by a right to privacy? That question seems no less ludicrous than asking about any other fundamental biological process. Do people have a right to physically mature? Grow taller, for example?

That said, a right, like the freedom of speech, is merely held in abeyance until we exercise it by acting on our choices. Consider religion: If we all had to be Catholic, that wouldn't be a freedom to exercise religion. It would be forced religious affiliation. The same is true for the right to make reproductive choices. Though reproduction is intrinsic to our biological nature, if the only way we could exercise this "right" is by engaging in reproductive acts, this would be nothing other than federally mandated reproduction.

How, then, can we exercise the right, as sentient beings, to make reproductive choices? We can either choose to reproduce or not to reproduce. If we choose the latter, how can we implement that choice? Abstinence is one option. But so too is masturbation (sole or mutual), oral or anal sex, the use of contraceptives, and abortion. All of these choices, then, ought to be protected by a Ninth Amendment right retained by the people: the right to exercise our choice of whether to reproduce or not.

What are the practical implications of this understanding for how the law relates to sexual liberties? The right to privacy is circumscribed. Yes, it may be a right retained by the people, but it doesn't provide a sanctuary for doing criminal acts. You can't, for instance, sell heroin in your bedroom and expect to be protected by the right to privacy. Selling heroin is a crime that revokes the right to privacy.

That was basically the argument in Bowers v. Hardwick that reaffirmed the criminalization of homosexuality. As Justice Byron White proclaimed, there is no fundamental right to sodomy. Meaning, in essence, as long as sodomy is a crime, it isn't protected by a right to privacy. And although the ruling in Bowers v Hardwick was overturned in Lawrence v Texas (2003), Justice Scalia's dissenting opinion in the latter reaffirmed, once again, that the Court recognized no fundamental right to sodomy.

If our fundamental rights as humans are enshrined in the Bill of Rights, so must be our right to make reproductive choices. It's right there in the Ninth Amendment. Remember that our Founding Fathers were many things, but not prudes; there seems little chance that liberties related to our private sexual behavior would not have been rights they thought government must respect. Benjamin Franklin had a child with a sex worker. Alexander Hamilton wrote an essay about his affair with a Mrs. Reynolds. Thomas Jefferson had long-term sexual relations, which included children, with his slave Sally Hemings. James Madison was either infertile or routinely used contraception with his wife, Dolly, who had children from a previous marriage. Condoms were readily available in the 18th century.

With this in mind, all of the sexuality-related Supreme Court cases, starting with Roe v Wade, can be rethought on new grounds. Not only do women have a fundamental right to privacy, but they also have a fundamental right to choose not to reproduce, including the choice to obtain an abortion. The real question, however, is not the viability of the Ninth Amendment—it's right there in black and white—but why the judiciary has concluded that they can ignore it with impunity, despite taking an oath to perform all the duties incumbent upon them under the Constitution and laws of the United States.

They are likely afraid that explicitly respecting the Ninth Amendment will open up a floodgate of appeals for all sorts of "rights retained by the people." That might be true, but fear doesn't justify denial. The Ninth Amendment does establish fundamental rights enshrined in the Bill of Rights. There's no getting around that.

Judge Robert Bork, in his 1987 confirmation hearing for the U.S. Supreme Court, said he just didn't know what the Ninth Amendment meant. He also declared, somewhat contradicting himself, that the Ninth Amendment implies that the enumeration of rights shall not be construed to "deny or disparage rights retained by the people in their State Constitutions." Is that so? Here's what James Madison had to say about state constitutions in his aforementioned speech to the first Congress: "Some states have no bills of rights, there are others provided with very defective ones, and there are others whose bills of rights are not only defective, but absolutely improper."

Judge Bork's answer made a mockery of any oath to uphold and defend the Constitution. The Ninth Amendment is indeed an integral part of the Bill of Rights. The Founding Fathers purposely did not enumerate all essential rights because to do so would have invariably minimized every right that had been inadvertently left off that list, or alternatively, every right that only became evident over time. Treating the Ninth Amendment as irrelevant derides both the Founding Fathers and the Constitution itself. My advice for legal scholars, lawyers, and those dedicated to defending and extending our rights is to dig deep into this amendment. Our constitutional rights depend upon it.

Paul R. Abramson is the lyricist and lead singer of the band Crying 4 Kafka. Crying 4 Kafka has been memorialized in Erika Blair’s book The Sanctity of Rhyme: The Metaphysics of Crying 4 Kafka in Prose and Verse (Asylum 4 Renegades Press, 2018). Paul is also an artist of note, and an Editor at Breathe. Otherwise, Paul is a professor of psychology at UCLA.

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Unconscious White Privilege

I was born in 1939 in what was then known as Madison Park Hospital, across the street from where Bernie Sanders grew up. Bernie lived just down the block from James Madison High School, where we both were distance runners on the track team.

Madison, which was one of the best high schools in the city, drew kids almost entirely from the surrounding neighborhoods. Of the more than 4,500 students at Madison in the mid-1950s, less than a dozen were Black. And one of them, Jimmy Dyer, was elected student government president.

Were we racists? Well, the guy who lost to Jimmy did say – very likely in jest – that maybe he would have won if he had been Chinese. Racism was something that might be present in other neighborhoods, but not in ours.

Two of the runners on the track team were Black people. But otherwise, I almost never saw a Black person in the neighborhood. Until the mid-1950s, virtually no Black families were allowed to live South of Eastern Parkway. The handful of Black students at Madison may have lived in Sheepshead Bay, where a few families were permitted to live in one of the low-income public housing projects.

It never dawned on me that I was living a life of white privilege until I was seventeen, and had gotten a full-time job in “the City.” Every morning at a quarter of eight, I would arrive at the Kings Highway subway station. Across the tracks, I would often see a surprisingly crowded train discharge scores of passengers.

Who was coming to our neighborhood while all of us were headed to work in Manhattan? Nearly all of them were women. And virtually all of those women were Black.

Obviously, they were maids on their way to work. Of course! Why else would so many Black women be getting off at Kings Highway? After all, they certainly didn’t live here.

It was only then that it finally began to dawn on me that there was a reason why no Black people lived in our neighborhood. Or why virtually the only Black people I had ever seen in our neighborhood were housemaids, earning a dollar-an-hour, plus carfare and lunch. Or why these women didn’t find better jobs. Well, I’m sure that you know the answers.

As it happened, I was also earning a dollar an hour, but in my case, it was to save up money for college. And I didn’t have to clean toilets and wash floors.

I worked in the office of a mid-size textile company. Of the fifty or fifty-five people who worked there, Connie and Cliff were the only Black people.

Connie and I were both file clerks, which I quickly realized was the lowest level job in the office. She had graduated from Brooklyn’s Girls High, but had no plans of going to college even though she had an academic diploma and had taken advanced algebra and solid geometry.

Cliff was in his fifties, and he remembered my mother, who had worked there as a typist years before, and had gotten me my job. When I mentioned him to her, she said that he was very proud of his daughters, who were both in high school. I was happy to report that they had become teachers, gotten married, and had children. Cliff carried around several photos which he showed me.

He was the maintenance man and the porter and taught me how to operate the mimeograph and addressograph machines. My mimeographing skills came in handy when I was working in political campaigns and years later, for running off exams when I taught at Brooklyn College.

When we had a “show week,” I was told to assist Cliff in moving loads of furniture and hundreds of heavy cartons to make room for the great textile show. I didn’t mind the work at all – it was a welcome break from filing – but Cliff told me to put in for an extra fifty cents an hour, which I did.

One day, Cliff pointed at the office manager and confided, “You know why I don’t have his job?” I did, of course. But then he pointed at his face and said, “This is why!”

But as Bob Dylan put it, “The times they are a-changin’” In the late 1950s, many Black people were finally permitted to rent apartments and even buy homes in the area between Eastern Parkway and Empire Boulevard. And by the sixties, they had breached that barrier and continued their march South towards Kings Highway.

Well, we all know the story of how the civil rights revolution finally brought about at least the amelioration of the most blatant forms of racial segregation. But the racist opposition to these changes was widespread not just in the South, but in the rest of the country as well.

There was an old saying about the attitude of whites toward Black people: In the South, they didn’t worry about the Black people getting too close – as long as they didn’t get too big. But in the North, they didn’t mind how big they got -- as long they didn’t get too close.

By the 1980s, you could see several Black people along the Kings Highway shopping strip. Some were students who went to Madison. But not very many Black people actually lived in the neighborhood.

Bernie Sanders had grown up an 85-apartment building. A professor who had recently been hired at Brooklyn College was the first Black person to live there. But he didn’t stay long. When the landlord heard about the professor, he was able to get him evicted because he had an illegal sublet.

Had Bernie heard about this, he probably would have come back from Burlington, Vermont, where he was the mayor, and picketed the building. Incidentally, more than two decades before, when Bernie was attending the University of Chicago, he helped lead a sit-in in the college president’s office for barring Black students from living in a new residential hall.

For 400 years the deck has been stacked against America’s Black people. Until the 1960s, that was legal. Even today, from the criminal justice system, to educational opportunities, housing, and jobs, the deck continues to be stacked.

In my entire life, I was stopped by the police just one time. What black man can make that statement? Even today, young black men – some of them clearly on the way to work – are routinely stopped by the police and questioned. And then, just for good measure, they’re stopped again on their way home.

I’d like to ask all the angry white men how many times they were stopped and frisked. Or asked to step out of their cars with their arms raised. How many people were stopped for “driving while white?”

I wonder how many angry white people know that a white high school dropout with a criminal record is more likely to be hired for a job than a Black college graduate with a clean record? Yeah, Black people sure do get all the breaks!

How many white men died gasping, “I can’t breathe!” with a policeman kneeling on their necks as they lay handcuffed and prone on the sidewalk?

Back in the 1950s, most of us were not at all aware of the white privilege that we enjoyed. But even today, more than half of all white Americans believe that they are the victims of racial discrimination. In Dylan’s civil rights hymn, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” he asks,

“Yes, and how many times can a man turn his head

And pretend that he just doesn’t see?”

A recovering economics professor, Steve Slavin earns a living writing math and economics books. Five volumes of his short stories have been published over the last six years, but he expects that the pace will slow.

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Columbus Reevaluated

By Gary Greene

Who was the villain in the saga

When he sailed the ocean blue

Was he the instrument or blunt tool

He sailed for king, queen and cross

Chartered by imperial forces to expand

What type of conquest was he after

And how would that change for those that followed

With writ of Bull, unholy commission

Make manifest the evil of superiority

Make chattel of the Saracens

Trade in property and cruelty

Let’s lay at the feet of the true villains

perverting faith and philosophy

for profit, glory and reach

We can morn the evil that has been done

Try to tear down relics of the past

But we should we look to with hope

with new clearer lens and wider scope

We need to tell the stories as ugly as they are

But let’s ask ourselves where do we go from here

A better world, a stronger society

do we lift the torch due to the fear of change

Or do we lift it to show the way to the future

Gary Greene is a retired engineer, living in Washington state. After working in many different fields, he has concentrated on reading and hosting a small Spanish Book Club for beginning Spanish Speakers.

Impetus for writing this poem has been following the local school boards discussion about critical race theory (CRT), the facts, the confusion, and I think the hidden agendas. Although there is some controversy about the source, of the following quote, I am keeping the thought in front of me “All evil needs to prevail is for good people to do nothing.”

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Rushdie

By Russell Willis
 

His pen, the sword penetrating deep prejudice

even as his words drowned in his own blood

Blood drawn by a knife, a weapon of hate

wielded by a man one-third his age filled

with lifetimes of hate, generations of hate

stabbing deep with prejudice

reminding us that freedom of words

carries a heavy cost, 

the heavy burden of all freedoms,

heavier yet when those entrusted 

with the care of freedom

no longer care

Russell Willis won the Sapphire Prize in Poetry in the 2022 Jewels in the Queen’s Crown Contest (Sweetycat Press) and has published poetry in thirty online and print journals and twenty print anthologies. Russell grew up in and around Texas and was vocationally scattered as an engineer, ethicist, college/university teacher and administrator, and Internet education entrepreneur throughout the Southwest and Great Plains, finally settling in Vermont with his wife, Dawn. He emerged as a poet in 2019 with the publication of three poems in The Write Launch. Russell’s website is https://REWillisWrites.com

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Imagine That

Imagine that

By Leopoldo Seguel

we are circling round

our own demise, hold

me back, I’m not sure

of myself, where 

are my people, we 

swallowed the earth

whole, remember when we were

young, imagine that, the ancients 

wept, made us honest, prayers

asunder, tattered visions, all

suffering is local, start

here, work outwards, till you

hold your friend

first, then your enemy

Leopoldo Seguel has hosted a monthly poetry reading in Seattle for the past 12 years. Although he has lived in the United States since age 5, his heart still resonates with his Mapuche legacy through his Chilean father and extended Chilean family.

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Hail Mamie Full of Grace (after Joseph Ross)

By Truth Thomas
 

Somewhere, always, the light switch of the moon is on

as babies feast from mothers’ milky pillows.

Somewhere, always, in cradles of the wee hours, swaddling

clothes are lullabies for newborn souls,

cocooning. Once, in a South Side manger, a mother

gave birth to a king. Hail Mamie full of Grace

the first time she counted Emmett's toes. Hail Mamie

full of Grace, the first time she tallied

his fingers, divined the weight of his smile. Hail Mamie

full of Grace in 1941, the very first time

that she dressed him, anointed him with sugar words,

cushioned his dreams when his diapers

were dry. Hail this Mamie full of Grace, who never

heard a seed barn scream, or saw

the barbed wire weep. The Lord is always with

thee, just like Bobo’s ring.

Truth Thomas is a singer-songwriter and NAACP Image Award-winning poet, born in Knoxville, Tennessee and raised in Washington, DC. He studied creative writing at Howard University and earned his MFA in poetry at New England College. His poems have appeared in over 150 publications, including Poetry Magazine and The 100 Best African American Poems (edited by Nikki Giovanni).

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American Volta

By Yash Seyedbagheri

they once said every poem needed a volta

a shift

a transition

a turn

but what about this poem

replete with shattered glass, shrieks, screams of 

socialism, books spirited away

distortions, banned abortions

tears mocked on TikTok

taking things from others for mythical greatness

Anglo-Saxon nomenclature above all else

another round fired while authorities slink away

Where is the volta?

another news story

another dissection 

another thought

another prayer

but no turn 

a man throws his meal against a wall

and tries to strangle truth

because he can

and his followers proclaim it all fake

lock dissent up

but you can’t lock dissent up

Let me tell you, I dream of Nazis every night

tossing and turning on sweat-stained sheets

and my name feels like a swarthy scarlet letter

a name mispronounced

a name which draws attention

and no comedy laugh track can drown it out 

night after night

I imagine words spat at me

cracking like bullets

terrorist, towelhead, camelfucker

and I see a fist flying into my face

while being chased by a sputtering truck

in the name of so-called justice

the exhaust consuming

I see it beneath the moon’s once luminous smile

behind a Ponderosa

I see it around each turn of a bend

I want a volta

a real volta

a fairy godmother to turn a page

and say it was all a dream

but I wake up

and all I see 

is someone’s intelligence

purged and bleeding in a trash can

another conspiracy

about something never stolen

all I want is a fucking, real volta

America

do you know where your voltas are?

Yash Seyedbagheri is a graduate of Colorado State University's MFA fiction program. His stories, "Soon,'' ''How To Be A Good Episcopalian,'' "Tales From A Communion Line," and "Community Time," have been nominated for Pushcarts. Yash’s work has been published in SmokeLong Quarterly, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Write City Magazine, and Ariel Chart, among others. He lives in Garden Valley, Idaho.

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Shooting Children

By Narayan Rajan

We have another massacre this week

In an elementary school in Texas.

Seventeen children and two teachers

Sacrificed to appease the gun Gods.

“Guns, guns, more guns”, still the drums roll

“People kill people, not guns”, despite the toll 

Exacted. Lives, loves, dreams, hopes all

Lead maelstrom engulfed. Yet another charnel.

A tribute to stupidity, lust for power, greed.

Should an unvetted teen be assault rifle equipped?

In moments, innocent little bodies to bits shred.

The “good guy with a gun” by aiming handicapped.

All reasonable, well-meaning individuals concur

Depraved slaughter of innocents must not recur.

Self evident is the need to restrict access to war

Weapons. Leave not a mote chance of a massacre.

The elephants note not bodies trampled underfoot

In their musth for power. They rush to court

Their gun gods, whose greed satisfies their lust.

Hand in hand, these ghouls dance their foxtrot.

“Now is the time for thoughts and prayers”, they intone.

The do-nothings’ thoughts are worth less than a fishbone.

Their prayers are either all to Mammon,

Or their God is busy playing chess with Satan.

In churches, temples they pray to Jesus Christ

The Son of God. They plead for him to intercept

Sins of omission and commission, God’s punishment

But Jesus, sweet Jesus, crucified Jesus hears only lament.

Bereaved, anguished mothers raise heart-rending cries

To indifferent skies. Their breast beating, sighs

Ruins of lives. Self-blame haunts hapless fathers

Forlorn families mourn preventable sacrifices.

Second amendment rights to arms granted to all

And sundry, hold the nation fettered, in thrall.

In a thriving society, discretion, decency prevail over all.

Worldly disgrace, shame impose curbs over the free-for-all.

The nation writhes in pain, helpless agony

Blind gun aficionados show no empathy

Days after gruesome massacre brandish weaponry.

Cannot reined in be this barbaric butchery?

If the pound of flesh is to second amendment granted

Should not laws address prevention of bloodshed?

The purveyor as well as the actor pilloried?

Yet, our partisan congress is deadlocked.

Let us each remember a murdered child

Each gun advocate endlessly remind,

“These children are dead, you are cursed”

Boycott socially the unrepentant accursed.

At Uvalde, good guys with guns stood around.

O for a R5D5, low slung, x-ray vision equipped

The shooter’s shots off it bounce, it him shoots dead.

Natural stupidity by artificial  intelligence conquered.

Subverters of measures preventing murder are guilty

Of murder. In days to come, with dotage and frailty

Their portion, the voices of bereaved mothers’ agony

Will ring in their minds, evoke hellish frenzy.

When leaders of the people callously squander

Lives of children, our dearest, our future

It’s past time to tear all blindfolds asunder

Find new leaders that serve the people with honor.

Narayan Rajan, or “Raj Rajan” as he prefers to be called was born over seventy years ago in Safdurjang Hospital New Delhi. The birthing surgeon nicked his temple with his scalpel. 

Raj was educated at The Lawrence School Sanawar, a residential public school (English usage, means private school), the Indian Institute Technology Kharagpur and the Indian Institute Of Science, Bangalore. He worked for the Indian Satellite Centre, NASA Ames Research Center and for almost forty Bay Area companies mostly as a contractor. His last full-time job was a two-and-a half year stint as an Apple employee. 

When Raj was twenty years old he was jilted for the first time. He consoled himself by writing verse and studying classical mechanics. After recovering from a nervous breakdown in 2018, he returned to writing poetry as a means of sharing his experience.

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2 FISTS (IN THE AIR FOR A REASON)

By Joseph Musso

if an afterlife exists and
saint and sinner alike 

are forgiven 

and end up in ‘heaven’ in the same brass and
wood room 

is it awkward… 

when murderer meets the murdered
when Derek Chauvin meets George Floyd
when Daniel Pantaleo meets Eric Garner
when Myles Cosgrove meets Breonna Taylor
when every slave-owner meets his slaves
when every black man lynched meets his lyncher
do they talk? 
forget? 
forgive?
laugh it off over beers?
hug it the fuck out???
live and let……LIVE?

so.

to.

speak.

or will it be a barroom
brawl,
fists flying,
chairs crashed over backs?

will all ‘hell’
break loose? 

so.
to.
speak.

Now let’s talk about
JUSTICE versus REVENGE…
are they not the same?
‘a rose by any other name’
When Martin Luther meets his 
murderer
which flag will snap
in the breeze
above their heads:
Confederate?
American?
King was murdered by a nation,
an ideology, by fear and racism.
Mostly, fear—
Murdered by
a star-spangled
deranged and mangled
jingle-jangled
old-fangled
Death Squad
  sent by ‘God’

King was killed, Ghandi, John Lennon, all men of peace.
So the question I fear to mention here
is: Peace loses to Violence every time, doesn’t it? 

Peace did not stop Hitler—
Roosevelt Stalin & Churchill did
Peace did not stop Japan—
the 2 baddest-ass bombs of their
time did

Peace, that flower wilting
in the hottest sun
beating down waterless &
without mercy—
The flowers all died in
tiny pale palmed hands,
whose?
Addie Mae Collins
Cynthia Wesley
Carole Robertson
Carol Denise McNair
4 little girls who got blown
up in a church in
nineteen
forty
nine
by a few sticks of Klan dynamite
& hate without conscience

How much has changed?

Peter Tosh said in song “No Justice No Peace”
that was 1976
this is 2022
Tosh is long gone
You and I will be long gone
and STILL it will stand:

NO JUSTICE    
NO PEACE

Joe Musso lives in NJ, in a place of big sky and water. He has a handful of books out there. Check them out if so inclined.

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